Acts of Reading

Interpretation, Reading Practices, and the Idea of the Book in John Foxe's Actes and Monuments

Edited by Thomas P. Anderson and Ryan Netzley

Hardback

Acts of Reading examines how John Foxe's Actes and Monuments shaped reading and interpretive practice in the early modern period and addresses the impact of recent electronic editions of Foxe's text on current reading practice and scholarship. The collection draws on history-of-the-book scholarship to make a plea for the centrality of Foxe to any discussion of Renaissance literary history. These essays also productively attend to the relationship between the materiality of books and the conceptual assumptions that govern our engagement with them. The anthology's focus on digital editions of Foxe's Book of Martyrs allows it to explore the often conflicted relationship between modern technologies of book production and reception and the early modern texts transmitted via these technologies. More broadly, Acts of Reading explores how books, and our encounters with them through different media, turn us into who we are.« lessmore »

Thomas P. Anderson is assistant professor of English at Mississippi State University. Ryan Netzley is assistant professor of English at Southern Illinois University.

Acts of Reading offers scholars of Foxe and students new to his work a set of valuable examinations of the Book of Martyrs…. One thing is sure: Those who read this book will help make Professor Tribble's assertion as old fashioned as relying entirely on a bound book to read The Book of Martyrs.— Clio: A Journal of Literature, History, and the Philosophy of History